Mexican President to Recognize Maduro’s Victory if CNE “Confirms Trend”

Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said Monday that he would recognize Nicolás Maduro’s victory if Venezuela’s National Electoral Council (CNE) “confirms the trend” after Sunday’s elections, although he asked to “wait for the recount.”

“We have to wait (for the count) to be 100% and we will be guided by that,” he said.

“We will wait for the results, once the recount has been carried out, to see what the legal process is and then we will make a statement. If the electoral authority confirms this trend, we will recognize the government elected by the people of Venezuela,” López Obrador said at his morning press conference.

The Mexican leader said that they “cannot ignore any result” of the CNE, which announced overnight that Maduro won with 51.2% of the votes compared to 44.2% for Edmundo González Urrutia of the opposition Democratic Unitary Platform (PUD) of Venezuela.

“This is the result with 80% of the polling stations, so we have to wait for 100% and we will be guided by this,” warned López Obrador. by showing a graph with the data that the Venezuelan electoral body supposedly presented and that has been questioned, since adding the percentages gives a total of 109.2%.

The Mexican president’s statements contrast with those of other Latin American left-wing governments, such as Chile, Colombia and Guatemala, which have called for transparency in the counting, while Brazil has asked to wait.

So far, China, Russia, Iran, Nicaragua and Cuba have recognized Maduro’s victory, while Uruguay, Argentina, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Guatemala, Panama, Paraguay, Peru and the Dominican Republic have called for an urgent meeting of the Organization of American States (OAS).

“We are going to wait for the votes to be counted. We have the information that the electoral body of Venezuela is giving the victory to President Maduro. This is what we know. It is the electoral body, the National Electoral Council. First comes the information,” López Obrador insisted.

The Mexican president also criticized the “great deployment on social media” by saying that “there you can see who is who because the media, the media companies, well, have their sympathy.”

On Sunday, Mexican Foreign Minister Alicia Bárcena only wrote on X that Mexico was “attentive to the results of the elections in Venezuela with love and affection.”

The secretary general of the ruling National Regeneration Movement (Morena), Citlalli Hernández, stated on her social networks that “in a furious manner” the “continental right wing was activated in an organized way on social networks” even without knowing the official results of Venezuela.

López Obrador congratulated “the people of Venezuela, all the people of Venezuela, because there was no violence in the election yesterday” considering that “things began to heat up at the closing” of the polling stations.

“Given the situation, which was very tense, I saw people in the street and not violent confrontations. In addition, I was attentive and, if there had been violence from the beginning or if it had been the hallmark of the election, it would have been the news all day, but that was not the news,” he said.